Ismail Kadare: Broken April

“It’s very cheap. Ten cents.”

Gjorg nodded impatiently. The innkeeper, moving awkwardly between the chairs and the table, cleared away dishes, brought fresh ones, and then disappeared again, finally coming back with a cup of coffee in his hand.

Gjorg was still sipping his coffee when a small group entered the inn. From the stir their arrival caused, from the turning of heads and by the way the lame innkeeper behaved in their presence, he understood that the newcomers must be well-known in the district. One of them, the man who came at once into the center of the room, was very short, with a cold, pallid face. After him came a man dressed like a townsman, but very oddly, with a checked jacket, and his breeches stuffed into his boots. The third man had a face whose features seemed somehow blunted and whose eyes rained scorn. But it was clear at once that everybody’s attention was centered upon the short man.

“Ali Binak, Ali Binak,” people began to whisper around Gjorg. His eyes widened, as if he could scarcely believe that there, in the same inn as himself, was the famous interpreter of the Kanun , of whom he had heard since he was a child.

The innkeeper, with his odd sideling walk, invited the small party into an adjacent room, evidently reserved for distinguished guests.

The short man mumbled a brief greeting to no one in particular, and without turning his head either to the right or to the left, he followed the innkeeper. While appearing to be aware of his fame, he was, surprisingly, quite without the haughty bearing common among men of small stature who have a sense of their own importance; on the contrary, his movements, his face, and especially his eyes, suggested the calm of a man without illusions.

The newcomers had disappeared into the other room, but the whispering on their account had not stopped. Gjorg had finished his coffee, but while he knew that time was important now, he was pleased to be sitting there, listening to the lively comments on every hand. Why had Ali Binak come? he wondered. No doubt to settle some complex case. Besides, he had been dealing with such things all his life. They called him from Province to Province and from Banner to Banner to ask his opinion in difficult cases, when the elders were divided among themselves over the interpretation of the Code. Of the hundreds of interpreters in the limitless space of the north country rrafsh *, there were no more than ten as famous as Ali Binak. So that it was not for nothing that he went to one place or another. This time, too, someone said, he had come about a complicated boundary question that had to be settled promptly, tomorrow, in the neighboring Banner. But who was the other, the man with the light-colored eyes? That’s right, who was he? They said he was a doctor whom Ali Binak often brought with him in thorny affairs, especially when it was a matter of reckoning up wounds to be paid for with fines. Well, if that was the case, Ali Binak hadn’t come about a boundary dispute but for some other reason, since of course a doctor had no business with boundaries. Perhaps they had misunderstood all along. Some said that he was in fact here about another matter, very complicated, that had come up a few days ago in the village beyond the plateau. In an exchange of shots because of a quarrel, a woman who happened to be there, between the rivals, had been killed in the crossfire. She was pregnant, and with a man-child, as was proved after the baby had been extracted. The village elders, it appeared, were very perplexed in deciding who had the duty of taking revenge for the infant. Could it be that Ali Binak had come to clear up this very case?

But the other one in his odd get-up, who was he? Just as with all the other questions, there was an answer to this one. He was a sort of public servant whose business was measuring land, but he had the Devil knows what kind of name to him that ended in “meter,” the kind of word you can’t pronounce without twisting your tongue, geo, geo…. that’s it, geometer .

Oh, then it must be about the boundary business, if this geometer, or whatever you call him, is here.

Gjorg wanted to stay and listen a while longer, the more so because there was every reason to think that people would be telling other kinds of stories at the inn, but if he lingered, he risked not getting to the castle in time. He stood up suddenly, so as not to be tempted again, paid for the beans and the coffee, and was about to leave; at the last moment he remembered to ask for directions once more.

“You take the highroad,” the innkeeper said, “then, when you come to the Graves of the Wedding Guests, at the place where the road forks, make sure you go right, not left. You hear, the right fork.”

When Gjorg went outside, the rain had fallen off still more, but the air was very damp. The day was as cloudy as the morning had been, and just as there are certain women whose age you cannot guess, there was no way to tell what time it was.

Gjorg went on, trying to think of nothing at all. The road stretched endlessly with grey wasteland on either hand. Once his eye fell on some half-sunken graves scattered along the roadside. He thought that these must be the Graves of the Wedding Guests. Then, since the road did not fork there, he decided that those graves must be further on. And so it turned out. They appeared a quarter of an hour later, and they were sunken like the others, but even more dismal, and covered with moss. As he passed them he imagined that the party of wedding guests he had met with that morning had simply turned round and come back to bury themselves in this cemetery and take up their abode here forever.

He took the right fork of the road, as the innkeeper had advised, and, moving on, he had to force himself not to turn his head and look at the old graves again. For a time, he managed to walk without a thought in his head, yet with a curious sense of being at one with the humped shapes of the mountains and the clouds about him. He was not aware how long he had been going on in that indolent way. He would have liked to go on in that way forever, but suddenly there rose up before him something that took his mind off the rocks and mists at once. It was the ruins of a house.

As he went by it, he looked out of the corner of his eye at the great heap of stones; rain and wind had long ago effaced the marks of the fire, replacing them with a sickly grey tint the sight of which seemed to help you get rid of a sob long imprisoned in your throat.

Gjorg walked on, looking sidelong at the ruins. With a sudden jump he vaulted the shallow roadside ditch and in two or three strides reached the pile of burned stone. For an instant he was still, and then, like someone who, confronted by the body of a dying man, tries to find the wound and guess what weapon has brought death near, he went to one of the corners of the house, bent down, moved a few stones, did the same thing with the other three corners, and having seen that the cornerstones had been pulled out of their beds, he knew that this was a house that had broken the laws of hospitality. Besides burning them down, there was this further treatment reserved for those houses in which the most serious crime had been committed, according to the Kanun : the betrayal of the guest who was under the protection of the bessa .

Gjorg remembered the punishment meted out some years ago in his village when the bessa had been violated. The murderer had been shot by the assembled men of the village, and he had been declared unworthy of being avenged. Then, without taking into account that the people who lived in the house were not guilty of the murder, that house, in which a guest had been killed in violation of the bessa , was burned. The head of the household himself was the first to scatter the firebrands and take the axe to the building, shouting, “May I wash clean my sins against the village and the Banner.” At his back, with torch and axe, came all the men of the village. After that, for years, nothing could be handed to the head of the house except with the left hand passed under one’s thigh, to remind him that he should have avenged the blood of his guest. For it was a settled thing that one could atone for the blood of a father, of a brother — even one’s child — but never for the blood of a guest.